by Alexis Smith
I thought, Fuck it. Give ’em a show. So I sat on the seat—jammed way down, knees up around my elbows—and I rode that thing around in circles in the dirt. My sergeant was shaking his head, and the guys and the kids are laughing and hooting. I looked ridiculous, I’m sure.
The last thing I remember is the face of the kid who fell in the dirt—he just stopped laughing all of a sudden. A Humvee about a hundred and fifty meters or so to my left was approaching a donkey cart—
He paused, looking out into the yard as two guys hauled a cooler over to the carport.
—and the donkey exploded.
What?
There was an IED on the donkey, or the cart, or maybe on some trash in the road. They put them in anything innocuous—soda cans, women—or repellent, like dead dogs. The donkey, the cart, and everything in and around it blew. We were just at the edge of the blast’s radius—the kids, me, the bike—we all got hit.
When I woke up, there was a spoke in my ribcage.
Isabel winced.
It pierced my right lung—I landed on it, actually. I woke up long enough to know I was hurt, then passed out again. I was lucky—no head trauma, no other major organs hit, just a few burns, some hearing loss. One of the kids died from shrapnel, I don’t know which one. I just picture the kid who fell off the bike. In my dreams sometimes he’s the neighbor kid from my childhood. And sometimes he’s a ten-year-old me.
He paused. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled out his mouth. He looked at her and his body relaxed, his shoulders released.
The weird thing, he said, is that the spoke hit my lung but missed the copy of Dhalgren in my vest pocket. It scraped past the bottom pages, left a little scar on it, but the words were untouched. I read it in the hospital. More than once.
Do you still have the book? she asked.
He nodded.
Will you ever read it again?
No.
Loon
She closes her office door, picks up the phone and calls Leo. She listens to the ringing on the line and glances over at the page from Sleepless Nights tacked to the wall with Leo’s name etched into it. The coincidence strikes her—how Leo wrote his name, all those years ago, on the page about going to Amsterdam, and how she was thinking of Amsterdam and the lovers, now, because of the postcard, at home, tacked to her wall.
Bell? comes his voice.
Hi, Loon, she says, feeling suddenly incapable of communicating verbally.
I need help, she blurts.
In trouble already? It’s barely lunch, girl.
I’m on a break, she says.
Oh, he says. I see. Wolf or woodsman?
Woodsman.
The one?
The same.
Oh, Bell, he says, sighing.
I know.
Tough love or shoulder to cry on?
Let me have it, please.
Gladly, he says, clearing his throat. Men are simple, Bell. Especially swarthy young woodsmen. He wants to know that you need him. He’ll stay out there in the trees toiling away till you call him to come running with his hatchet.
Won’t that be a thrill, she says.
I’m a little jealous, I admit, he replies.
What fairy tale are we in, anyway?
Doesn’t matter.
Of course it matters. Anyway, I was thinking of asking him to the party tonight.
Yes. Do it.
Are you bringing someone?
Mm, he hesitates. There may be a potential fellow there. Little Red Riding Hood?
More like Little Blue Vintage Coat. How should I ask him? Like I know it’s a date, or more casual, like it’s just a thing we could do, as two friendly coworkers? I hate this part. I’m so bad at this part.
Muster up your courage, march on over there, and ask him like you just tromped through the thorny brambles to find him.
You’re clever, but really.
Listen to me.
I listen. I’m listening.
You’ve been here before, Bell. Remember the stories you told me about wandering in the woods when you were a little girl? It scared the crap out of you, but you went out there all alone, knee-high to a bunny rabbit, and picked berries and climbed trees and found bird nests and came home all bug-bitten and mossy. And you loved every minute of it. It made you our beautiful Arctic Bell, impervious to cold and feared by mosquitoes. Aren’t you glad you didn’t stay by grandma’s side, darning socks and baking gingerbread?
Who darns socks?
Girls nobody tells stories about.
Bones
She walks down the hall to the bathroom. After checking for feet under the stall doors, she goes to the mirror. She washes her hands, dirty from the books she has handled all morning. She watches the water flow over her hands and down the drain, then quickly glances up at her reflection in the mirror. It’s a game she plays with herself. She thinks if she just sees herself from the right angle, when she’s not thinking about it, the mirror will show her something that she has never seen before, something that other people see.
At a family party when she was about nine, she overheard an aunt say: Isabel is a bit homely next to Aggie, isn’t she?
Homely was a new word, so Isabel went to the dictionary. She never looked in the mirror the same way again.
She was plump, awkward, eyes too big for her face, hair twisted in spitty wisps. She thought she looked good in her older sister’s nicest hand-me-downs—clothes that had always received compliments when Aggie wore them—but she started to see how the sleeves were too tight around her upper arms, and how the buttons of the blouses strained to stay in their holes around her tummy.
Did you eat a whale for breakfast? she remembers a scrawny boy named Derek asking her in fourth grade.
They were lining up to return to the classroom after recess. She pretended to ignore him, bracing herself for the punch line, already feeling the blood rush to her cheeks.
Because you are what you eat and you look like a beached whale, he finished.
No one thought it was funny, but no one came to her defense, either.
That night after her bath, she stood in front of the mirror and stared at herself.
She thought about whales. Once, in Resurrection Bay, a young gray whale that lost its pod followed the boats around for several weeks. Isabel was on a tour boat with her grandparents and some distant cousins from Washington. They watched the whale come closer and closer to the boat until he actually bumped it lightly, rubbing against the hull lovingly, like a cat. He swam away, then back again, coming up just enough to make contact, rocking the boat like a cradle. Isabel had seen whales before, but she had never felt quite so close to one, looking into his great big black eye and seeing herself.
I’m a whale, she said into the bathroom mirror.
I’m a whale! she shouted.
Her mother knocked on the door and opened it without waiting, looking alarmed. Isabel blushed.
Everything okay, Belly? she asked.
Isabel wrapped a towel around herself. Her mother sat on the toilet behind her and their eyes met in the mirror. They looked nothing alike. Her mother was diminutive, with fine, delicate features, freckles, and dark brown curly hair. Agnes took after their mother.
Isabel looked just like pictures of her father’s Irish grandmother when she was a young woman, a fisherman’s daughter—later, a fisherman’s wife—larger and heavier in bones and flesh.
If I were a whale, Isabel said, trying to avoid the question, I would be a narwhal.
She imagined spearing scrawny little Derek through the heart with a giant tooth.
Her mother smiled weakly.
Isabel, she said seriously, believe me when I tell you that everything is temporary. Everything. There’s not a thing in the world that will not change, including you.
She looks at herself in the mirror now, her light brown hair gathered up at the back of her head in a messy bun, wavy strands falling around her face. She pulls the pencil out of it and gives
it a shake, letting it cascade down her shoulders like in a shampoo commercial. She laughs at herself and searches her pocket for lip gloss, leaning in to apply it. She stands back to assess and relaxes the space between her eyebrows. She has thick eyelashes and blue eyes. A small dark mole marks her upper right cheek, below her eye. She plucks at her cheeks to make them fill with blood, and watches the blush spread over her skin.
Her mother was right, she admits. She grew taller; those bones and that flesh had spread out.
She practices a smile—a real smile, the one she would give Spoke if she had the courage. She thinks, for the first time, that it is possible she is actually quite beautiful, and she wishes Spoke could see her just then, the way she catches herself.
Danish Modern
As she leaves the library, there are no human sounds, only machine sounds: the refrigerator humming, the susurration of the vents, their steady, mechanical exhalations. Everyone has slipped out for lunch ahead of her.
Outside at midday, Isabel feels the last breath of summer on her skin. The hum of the library is still in her ears, but drowning now in the noise of the city. She smells the food carts from blocks away, the hot oil and garlic and roasting meat that flows through the air every workday, mingling with the rank warm sewers and the burnt-oil musk of the buses and delivery trucks, and under that, when her feet tread the grass under the trees, the smell of damp bark and vegetal decay.
She breathes it in and lets herself think of Spoke. She imagines walking with him, like this, through the city. Telling him how cold air and leaves and gasoline smell like the first day of school to her.
It’s a strange product of infatuation, she thinks. To want to tell someone about mundane things. The awareness of another person suddenly sharpens your senses, so that the little things come into focus and the world seems more beautiful and complicated.
When M wrote to L, she thinks, he didn’t tell her about his journey. There was no description of the city, or his lodgings or museums. The brevity of the postcard—the intense focus on the moment in the park—it was as intimate as a young man could be. Like reaching out and brushing a strand of hair from her eyes.
Isabel imagines M, and she can’t help seeing him as a character in an Antonioni film: young, disaffected, wandering. He wears a wrinkled button-down shirt and a jacket, trim trousers, and of course the hat—a dashing straw fedora, brown with a dark band. She sees him clearly, though in this film of hers, everything is just barely in color—like the postcard.
She thinks of everything she knows about 1965 and comes up with a meager tableau of the Vietnam War, Pucci prints, and Danish Modern furniture. But M she can see clearly. He could be the prototype of any young man in her city: the mustachioed barista, the tattooed bookseller, the plaid-shirted clerk at New Seasons Market.
This is the way it would have been for L, too, Isabel thinks: never having been to Amsterdam, she would cobble together a picture with images from postcards and books and photographs. She would close her eyes and see him sitting under the trees, taking off his hat and resting it beside him, brim up. He reclines on the grass, propped on one elbow, and opens his book to her—the picture of her he keeps between the pages.
Isabel tries to picture L: a woman in her twenties, like Isabel, on the cusp of possible love, going about her life in this city, waiting for postcards. But she can’t see her. She can only feel for her.
Choirgirl
Isabel turns down Oak toward the little vintage shop at Fourth Avenue, thinking of lunch—the Chinese place in Old Town, casting around inside herself for hunger, imagining the tastes of things.
She steps up to the stoop of the vintage shop. It looks dark—no sign on the door to indicate whether it is open or closed, or what the business hours might be. Isabel knows this already, from previous visits. She peeks through the window. A mannequin, dressed in something Joan Crawford could have worn—elegant but angular, all shoulders—is headless, her fingers chipping away. Beyond the racks of dresses and blouses and coats, Isabel spies a dressmaker’s dummy moving.
Traffic thrums on the street behind her. She tries the door—unlocked—and a small string of bells jangles against the glass as she pulls it open and steps inside.
Hello! comes the muffled voice of the shopkeeper, and she pops up from behind the counter, bright white hair piled on top of her head. She lifts her hand in greeting, a pincushion attached at the wrist.
Hi, Isabel waves.
Oh, hello! she recognizes Isabel now. It ’s Nancy Drew, isn’t it?
Good memory, Isabel says. The woman helped her assemble a girl sleuth costume last Halloween.
And how did it go?
Perfect, she answers, her hands already running through the dresses on the rack to her right.
Of course it was, the woman answers, amused, turning back to her mending. Isabel remembers this amusement from the last visit, as well. The woman seems ready to be pleased with the world.
Isabel looks around and quietly inhales. She loves the smell of old things. Every available space bursts with clothing. Open hatboxes full of hankies, taffeta-lined suitcases offering slips and garters, circles within circles of shoes atop racks scrunched with skirts and blouses. For a moment, she is back in this morning’s dream, amid the clothes, smelling the decay of cloth and leaves, feeling the weight of sleep in her limbs and waiting for the birds to crow.
She moves among the clothes, eyes drifting up to the dresses suspended from the ceiling, hovering far above her head, swaying, as if dancing. She wonders what a group of dresses would be called, if they were living things: a choir, she thinks, a choir of dresses.
So, what brings you in today, hon?
Isabel looks back at the shopkeeper, unsure of how to answer.
A party dress, she says finally.
Ah-ha! the shopkeeper says, pleased. What kind of party dress?
Blue? she says, apologetically, shrugging.
The shopkeeper laughs, a strand of white hair falling into her face.
Well, she says, I’ve worked with less. How about this: What kind of party?
It’s for a playwright who just won some prestigious award. It’s at his loft, in Old Town, a renovated casket factory.
Ah, I know the place, the lady says. Will there be dancing?
Probably.
Definitely, I would say.
She sticks a needle in the pincushion and pulls it from her wrist. She walks over to Isabel and stands back to take a look at her.
You’re about, what? Twenty-nine-inch waist?
Isabel nods.
I may have something in back—from an estate sale last month. I’ll have to dig for a minute. Meanwhile, you look around—you might find some things you like over here.
Okay. Thanks.
Isabel turns to the rack nearest her. The dresses are from the 1930s, some of them so delicate she can’t imagine anyone but ghosts wearing them. Faded flowers, velvet trim worn down to the ribbon, buttons nodding at the floor.
She hears the shopkeeper tossing things around in her storeroom. Something falls and the lady curses, but it’s a stifled, antiquated curse Isabel can barely make out. Something like bollocks.
Found it! the lady calls. Oh, yes. This is the dress for you, my dear.
She emerges, triumphant, dress folded over her arm. When she reaches Isabel, she holds the dress up by the shoulders. Creamy cotton with a print of teal and sapphire umbrellas with black handles. Sleeveless; full dancing skirt.
Isabel’s heart leaps.
Sixties? she asks.
I think so, let’s see. The lady peeks in the back by the zipper.
No label. If it had a label I could tell you where she bought it, and when—probably Meier & Frank; it’s a classy, well-made dress. Early sixties, I would say, owing to that full skirt. But it’s above the knee, and the pattern and cut around the shoulders say sixties for sure. Try it on.
She hands it to Isabel and gives her a nudge toward the dressing nook.
&nbs
p; You bought it from an estate sale? Isabel asks, pulling the bark-cloth curtain across the metal bar. There is a string of Chinese lantern lights around the mirror and a little milk glass lamp with a fringed shade on a table. She lays the dress on an ottoman in the corner.
I bought the whole closet from the sister and brother-in-law of this woman, the shopkeeper tells her. A nice old house in North Portland.
She talks as Isabel undresses. Isabel hears the woman moving around, hanging clothes, her voice floating first near, then farther away, then back. The rattle of all the dresses on a rack shifting to make room for another.
Most of the clothes weren’t very exciting, she continues. But there were a couple of dresses like this one and a really nice coat in some garment bags at the back of the closet. They obviously meant something to her—you don’t keep a dress so long unless it means something to you. She probably met her first lover in that dress!
Isabel hears a muffled laugh as she pulls the dress over her head.
The cool fabric settles over her skin, and she thinks how this might be the first time in decades that a warm body has filled this space. She reaches behind her for the zipper and feels the fabric tighten around her as she draws it up to her mid-back, then stretch perfectly across her shoulders as she tugs it the last few inches up her spine.
It’s never the wedding dresses, you know. We keep those, too, but only because they’re so blooming expensive. No. I’ve seen enough old ladies’ closets to know what we really hold on to. Not the till-death-do-us-part dresses. It’s those first lovely dresses: the slow dance dresses, the good-night-kiss dresses. It’s those first pangs we hold on to.
Isabel turns to the mirror, bare feet pivoting on the geometric linoleum. In her reflection, she can almost see the girl who wore the dress before her.
